Overall, there were 654,006 people eligible to take part in the election as either full members, registered supporters who had paid £25, or affiliates largely through the trade unions. Of this total, 506,438 cast a vote.

Despite an electoral system that seemed to have been skewed to favour Corbyn’s challenger, by denying a vote to anyone who joined either as a member or an affiliate since January, by raising the fee for being a registered supporter to £25, and by purging or suspending from membership thousands of members who had said something “wrong” on social media (here’s a post from Roz Kaveney on how this was managed: see also), Corbyn got clear majority for his leadership across the board: 59% of the Labour Party membership as of December 2015 voted for him, 70% of those who had paid £25 to become registered supporters, and 60% of those who had a vote as affiliated supporters mostly via trade unions.

So, the Labour Party MPs who persist in saying that Jeremy Corbyn isn’t the leader they want, now have a few options.Continue reading →

At the Scottish Politician of the Year awards ceremony at the Prestonfield House Hotel in November 2004, Mike Watson got very drunk. He’d been drunk at the dinner, he got even more drunk at the VIP party after the dinner, and as the hotel staff were clearing up, he was “asking forcefully for more wine” and they gave him an open bottle, evidently hoping he’d go away.Continue reading →

Despite all of the attacks, personal and political, from Louise Mensch in New York to Liz Kendall in the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn is now Leader of the Opposition and leader of the Labour Party.

Atul Hatwal wrote in Labour Uncut on 22nd July: Sorry, that Labour leadership poll is nonsense. Jeremy Corbyn is going to finish fourth.

As the new deputy leader of the Labour Party wrote in the New Statesman a few days ago:

Good debate, above all in a process like this, should also be about listening. It’s easy to forget in the passion of one’s own beliefs, but you also have to listen to the others. All of them.

And you have to start from the position that, inside the Labour party, we are all good people with good motives – indeed, with the same motives – and nobody is right about everything. And nobody is wrong about everything either. Liz Kendall is not a Tory and Jeremy Corbyn is not a Trot, and saying either of those things – on Twitter, on Facebook or in real life – just plays into the hands of our real opponents – the Tories. And they hold enough cards at the moment as it is.
– Tom Watson

I don’t believe the Labour Party administration are rigging the leadership election to keep Jeremy Corbyn from winning. I don’t think that’s what they’re trying to do, and I don’t think they’d succeed in doing it if they tried. I think Jeremy Corbyn’s likely to win: if he loses, it won’t be because of the Labour Party’s purge of voters.

From 7th April 2017, parents claiming child tax credit will be limited to claiming it for two children only. This is George Osborne’s latest flashy scheme for punishing low-income families in a pretence of “saving money”.

Liz Kendall openly supports this: Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper decline to oppose it (Cooper says she’ll “fight” it but that didn’t extend to voting against it in the Commons). They know that 50% of people who voted Labour in May 2015 support the two-child rule, and Burnham and Cooper aren’t about to try to stick their heads over the parapet and say it’s wrong to do so.

I wrote a few weeks ago why I think this policy is wrong, but this post is about the people who are blithely sure this won’t really affect children of low-income families, and why they haven’t thought it through.